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Robert Charles Wilson
155 quotes
“And death? I don’t fear death. I dread the absence of it.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consciousness,” according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The “self” was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal—maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin’s age possess no context; one video event is much like another.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Personally, I don’t believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point?”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren’t here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s no point living if you can’t, at least occasionally, live.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When does loyalty become martyrdom?”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was possible at last to hear the silence—to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want them not to forget. Which is, I suppose, what all aged veterans want. But they’ll forget. Of course they will. And their children will know less of us than they do, and their children’s children will find us barely imaginable. Which is as it should be. You can’t stop time.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wow,” Sue said. “You actually stole this?” “We don’t use that word,” Elaine told her. “Chris has an unnamed high-level source.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn’t in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge—to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’s exactly what she wants. He’s the last thing she needs.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault.” “Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first. When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you’re at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives...For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An honest book is almost as good as a friend.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He rolled his eyes. “Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying ‘I love you’—it serves to facilitate the fucking.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or. Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn’t the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When was it obvious she was ill?” “Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well—months.” “Has she had any kind of medical attention?” Pause. “Simon?” “No.” “Why not?” “It didn’t seem necessary.” “It didn’t seem necessary?” “Pastor Dan wouldn’t allow it.” I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself?”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It never fails to astonish me,” Carol said. “The tenacity of love.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’ll do what life always does—defy expectations.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You learning anything from this?” Tyrell asked. Turk stood up and brushed his hands. “Yeah. I'm learning that I know even less than I thought I did.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s no drug that’ll make a stupid man smart.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn’t sure he trusted it.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source